Saturday, March 15, 2008

Kim's belated 26th Birthday

I'm backlogged in events apparently.

Kim's birthday was ultimately celebrated for the past two weekends (not this one). The first celebration was the rescheduled casino trip. It was snowing that day too, but somehow we all made it down just fine. It was as smokey and crowded as I remember but Kim and the others seemed to have fun and Trevor was there to assist the girls when he felt that the guys they were dancing with were being too pushy and aggressive. I had fun, but most of my fun was getting ready, doing my hair and prettying up. Walking outside in the snow with dress shoes...not quite as fun as you'd think. The weekend after, since there was pretty low turnout for the limo; there were about 10 of us all together, the other party friends also wanted to celebrate Kim's birthday so they had a more local celebration at two bars around here. I originally wanted to tag along but apparently Kim's birthday always brings precipitation because it was pouring rain that day and evening and Trevor and I mutually decided it was not a good party night. On the bright side, Kim, Viki and Dianna's crew seemed to have tons of fun.

My dad's back from Vietnam and so is my ao dai, which I'm hoping I don't sweat to death in since it's long sleeved. Otherwise it fits fine (thankfully) though it's a little long so I might ask my mother to hem them for me so I don't trip on myself. She says it's supposed to be long, but I don't think I'm supposed to step on it.

My friend Nini in Cali is also getting married. We've been friends since high school and throughout college so I'm really happy for her that she's been able to find a guy she not only wants to date, but to actually marry and spend her life with. I wish I could do more to help her with her wedding planning but since she's so far away it's a tad difficult. So far I've sent her a few pictures of things I liked that I couldn't use for my own wedding. I could have ten weddings and still not use all the ideas I ran into that just didn't work with my color scheme, budget, theme...etc. So I'm more than happy to share some of my inspiration because it does no one any good if it's not utilized.

So it's a huge marriage fest among my friends, with the first to dive in being my friend Jenny J. from college. She's totally on top of her wedding planning though. She's getting married in June and she's already sent out her shower invites (well her mom did). I'm getting married two months after her and I don't even have a concrete guest list. lol I know who of my friends I'm inviting. I know the family members Trevor wants to invite and his friends, but the question mark is my own family and how many of them we'll be inviting because...let's just be blunt, I feel like I'm related to half of the Vietnamese people in the world. My dad's the 9th born in his family and my mother is the 8th born. I've left it to my parents to prioritize who needs to be invited because I honestly have no idea about any protocol.

If it were up to me we'd just have a tiny wedding of like 50 guests, but for the sake of appeasing our families we're bumping it up so I don't accidentally alienate any of my family members. I don't really think too much about alienating friends, as weird as that may sound because if they're roughly my age and of marrying age they usually understand how expensive it is to throw a wedding and a lot of people don't even like being a guest at a wedding because...let's face it, they're not always fun, they don't always serve good food or play good music, you immediately don't know half (or more) of the people there, and you have to buy people a present. If you're female you have to get two presents if you're also invited to a bridal shower and it can be a very stressful and expensive undertaking.

In short, being a wedding guest sort of sucks. I've been a date to a wedding which I knew almost no one and it's kind of weird and awkward, like I didn't really belong there and there was that awkward moment in the receiving line where they had to introduce me to the bride and groom because they hadn't met me ever before. lol Even if it's kinda cold, I'd really like to avoid having those "I have no idea who you are" moments at my own wedding.

So I have no qualms about cutting down my wedding guest list to a very minuscule number of friends. I only have 3 college friends I intend to invite and 2 of them are part of my wedding party. On the bright side, I know each of the people I'm inviting really want to be there to support me as opposed to snoop on what's been going on with me since graduation and then talk about me behind my back.